Pressure Groups in France

As elsewhere pressure groups in France operate on all levels of the political process: shaping public opinion, manipulating political parties, pressing for favorable legislation in Parliament and for desirable rulings by the executive. What distinguishes the tactics and the effects of pressure-group action from those in other countries results rather from the particu larities of the French political apparatus, from the uneven de velopment of economic growth, and from the divided loyalties of the French people. Because of the lack of disciplined par ties in a multiparty parliamentary system, interest groups can operate from within the cabinet. The question to which ex tent it has penetrated the once solidly walled sphere of the high administration is controversial. But that the rigidity and an "immobilism," characteristic of pressure groups everywhere, is transferred in France to the machinery of government, is gen erally admitted; it leads to an analogous immobilism of the political organs and hence has contributed to the crisis of the French Republic.